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The Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine
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Publisher: Randy Ingermanson ("the Snowflake guy")
Motto: "A Vision for Excellence"
Date: October 3, 2005
Issue: Volume 1, Number 7
Home Pages: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com
http://www.RSIngermanson.com
Circulation: 2707 writers, each of them creating a
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
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What's in This Issue
1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine!
2) Congratulations to . . .
3) Tiger Marketing
4) A Tiger Marketing Makeover
5) Writing a Novel In a Month
6) How Can I Help You?
7) What's New At AdvancedFictionWriting.com
8) Steal This E-zine!
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1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine!
Those of you who have joined in the past couple of
months (more than 500 of you are new since my last
issue), welcome to my e-zine! You can find all the
previous issues on my web site at:
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/html/afwezine.html
As you all know, Hurricane Katrina essentially wiped
out New Orleans and a number of other cities on the
Gulf Coast at the very end of August. In view of the
massive relief efforts that occupied the entire
country, I decided not to send out a September issue of
this e-zine. This month, I'm back on track, with more
information on the craft and marketing of your fiction.
In this issue, I'll announce the winner of a brand new
iPod and tell you what steps you can take to improve
your chances of being the next winner.
I'll also do two articles on Tiger Marketing, one on
the theory and one on a "Tiger Marketing Makeover" that
I'm just beginning for a friend of mine.
November is National Novel Writing Month! Are you
ready? I'll give you a brief intro on what "NaNoWriMo"
is all about and how a lot of writers get themselves
geared up for it.
In the last couple of months I've given some serious
thought to how I help more of you develop your writing
careers. I'm spread pretty thin right now, so it's hard
for me to help you directly. But I've got some ideas on
how I can help you indirectly. And help is help, right?
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2) Congratulations to . . .
I began this e-zine back in March with high hopes. I
figured that by the end of the year, I could maybe have
1000 subscribers. I was wrong.
I reached that goal in a couple of months, and that's
when I set my sights really high--2000 subscribers. I
figured that would be pretty close to Total World
Domination, right? To help speed that process, I
announced that I'd hold a drawing when I got to 2000
subscribers, with a twist. I wouldn't draw from the
list of subscribers. Instead, I'd draw from the list of
those who REFERRED a subscriber. And each referral
earned the referrer another entry in the drawing. Those
who referred 50 people got put in the hat 50 times.
This e-zine passed 2000 subscribers some time in late
July, and I held the drawing in early August. The
winner was Judy Anderson of Freeland, Michigan. (I have
her permission to use her name here.) Once I got her
snail-mail address, I hopped on the Apple web site and
bought a snazzy new iPod for her. I had promised one of
those $99 iPod Shuffles with 512 MB of memory, but I
decided to throw in an extra 30 bucks and get her the
model with twice the memory. Happy listening, Judy!
Oops, Judy won't even see this congratulations. The odd
thing is that Judy doesn't subscribe to this e-zine.
She's NOT a writer, she's just a fan of mine who told a
friend about my web site. That friend became a
subscriber and listed Judy as her referrer. Funny how
life works out, isn't it?
Giving out an iPod was so much fun, I've decided to do
it again, only better. I'm certain that Total World
Domination will surely slip into my grimy grasp once I
have 5000 subscribers. So that's my next target. The
prize will be an iPod Nano--that glitzy 4GB model that
Apple just released. Take a look at it right here:
http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/
If you want a shot at that pesky iPod, just tell your
friends about this e-zine. And twist their arms to list
YOU as their referrer. (They will be disqualified if
they list themselves as their own referrer.) Who knows?
You might have a Nano in your stocking this Christmas.
At the rate this thing is growing, the Advanced Fiction
Writing E-zine will soon be the largest fiction-writing
e-zine on the web. Maybe I should start aiming for
Total Galactic Domination?
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3) Tiger Marketing
I coined the term "Tiger Marketing" back in the first
issue of this e-zine to describe the use of advanced
web-based marketing techniques to promote fiction.
Tiger Marketing is a big topic, and I've been writing a
regular column on how you can make it work for you.
In the last issue (August), I discussed how to identify
which "search keywords" are the most valuable. A search
keyword is a word or phrase that can be searched for on
a search engine, such as Google. Such a keyword can
bring lots of hits to your web site if two conditions
are met:
* Lots of people are searching for that keyword.
* The search engines believe your web site has "high
relevance" to that keyword.
In the last issue, I explained exactly how to find a
list of keywords that many people are searching for.
That's the first half of the battle. The second half is
to increase the relevance of your web site for a given
keyword. That's today's topic.
This is actually pretty simple. Search engines are
constantly scanning the web, automatically reading web
pages and figuring out what each page is "about". Now
these engines aren't terribly smart. They don't
actually understand your web page. What they do is look
at the words on your page and figure out which of them
are "most important" as content on that page. Then,
when somebody searches for a particular keyword, the
search engine refers to them to the pages for which
that keyword is highly important.
Please note something very important. A page that is
"about everything" is going to be considered to be
"about nothing" by the search engines. So if you want
one of your web pages to rank high in searches for a
particular keyword, then that page probably won't rank
nearly as high for other keywords. Tough beans. If you
want people to find your site using another keyword,
make another page that's optimized for that keyword.
Now we get to the nub of the matter. How do you
optimize a web page for searches on a particular
keyword?
Here is another important principle. Not all words on
your page are created equal. When a search engine looks
at your page, it assigns a higher "relevance" to words
that it finds in particular locations on that page. And
those locations aren't a secret. Here they are:
* The title. If the title of your web page contains a
given keyword, then that keyword is considered HIGHLY
relevant to the page.
* The "description metatag". When you create a web
page, you can define certain "metatags" that describe
that page to search engines. One of these metatags is
the "description" metatag. This is usually a
one-paragraph description of what the page is about.
Any words in that description are going to be
considered prime keywords by the search engines.
* The "keyword metatag". You can define a metatag for
each page that tells the search engines what YOU think
are the most important keywords on that page. Resist
the urge to include a zillion keywords in this metatag.
Less is more. If you put only one keyword in this
metatag, then the search engines will believe that that
keyword is profoundly important to that page. If you
have twenty keywords, then the search engine knows
you're blowing smoke and it won't regard ANY of them as
being important.
* The headings. If you have a given keyword in any of
the headings of your page, then that keyword is
considered highly relevant for that page.
* The top of the page. Search engines believe that you
put the most important words near the top of the page.
Do so.
* The "alt-tags". And what the heck is an "alt-tag"? An
alt-tag is an "alternative" to an image. Here's the
thing. Not everybody who browses the web can see the
images. Folks with limited vision may not be able to
see it. And those web-browser phones that have limited
space may not display images. To let these folks know
what they're missing out on, you can include an
"alt-tag" for each image. The alt-tag simply spells out
in text what the image is about. Search engines rank
keywords more highly when they occur in an alt-tag.
* The frequently occurring words on the rest of the
page. If the text of your page contains one word fifty
times, then the search engine can be reasonably sure
that the word is in fact highly relevant to the content
of that page.
It's a good idea to look at every single web page on
your site and ask yourself what keyword you'd like to
optimize that page for. Choose one for each page, but
no more than one. Then make sure that keyword occurs in
each of the above locations on the page. However . . .
Don't spam the search engines! Search engines know when
you're cheating. If you have a page about camel cheese,
and you include the words "Marilyn Monroe" all over the
page in the same color as the background of the page,
(making it invisible to readers, but visible to search
engines) then the engines will flag you as an abuser
and your page will be ranked LOWER than it would have.
You might even get black-listed.
If all this seems kind of theoretical, I'd like to
bring it down to earth a bit in the next article . . .
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4) A Tiger Marketing Makeover
Recently, a friend of mine asked me how to improve her
ranking on Google. I looked at her web site and gave
her a list of several ways to have her webmaster tweak
her site to make it more appealing to Google.
A little background here, to explain what kind of site
she's got and why I would help her for free, and why I
can't do the same for you, drat it. (I'm a busy guy,
and there are nearly 3000 of you and I can't possibly
do a free website makeover for all of you. In fact, if
you all send me email and I answer one each 30 seconds,
it'll take me a full 24 hours to get through all the
email!)
My friend's name is Meredith Efken. She happens to be
the best critiquer I've ever had. She's now critiqued
my last three novels, and she's made incredibly useful
suggestions for each of them. And she doesn't charge me
a dime. I owe her big time. That's why I'm happy to
help her with her Tiger Marketing.
As it happens, Meredith is a very talented novelist,
and her first mom-lit book is coming out in November
under one of the imprints owned by Harlequin. In my
opinion, Meredith is funnier than Erma Bombeck, and I
wrote an endorsement saying so for her book.
The title of Meredith's novel is "SAHM I Am". If you're
wondering what "SAHM" might mean, it's an acronym for
"Stay At Home Mom". The story is about an email loop of
Stay At Home Moms, run by a hilarious control freak
named Rosalyn. The main characters are a few subversive
moms who rebel against Rosalyn's "sanctimoniouser than
thou" attitude. Since I write humor myself, it's hard
to make me laugh. Dave Barry used to get me about once
per column. Erma Bombeck did that too when she was
alive. Meredith's book had me laughing out loud EVERY
TWO PAGES. Both times I read it. This a darn good book,
if you like humor.
For reference, Meredith's web site is here:
http://www.meredithefken.com/
As you can see, it's got a great look to it--very artsy
and appealing to her target audience.
The question that Meredith asked me was this: How can I
make my web site come up when somebody Googles the
keyword phrase "SAHM I Am"?
I Googled this phrase and found that Google believes
there are about 1.4 million web pages relevant to this
keyword. Unfortunately, Meredith's web site is not on
the top ten results. As of today, #6 on the list of
returns is a book review of her book. #10 is another
book review of her book. The other results on Google's
top 10 all point to other sites, including one site
that lists a book with the same title by somebody else.
I continued on through the first 100 results on
Google's list and did not find Meredith's web site.
The first thing to understand is that this is not
anyone's fault. It's just due to the fact that
Meredith's site is new. It takes time to develop a web
presence. But you can accelerate the process, and
that's what we'll focus on here. Over the course of the
next few months, Meredith's goal should be to improve
her ranking on certain important keywords. For now,
we'll just work on the keyword phrase "SAHM I Am".
I browsed through Meredith's site and chose one page to
optimize for this keyword, the page that talks about
her book. This is the logical choice. Take a look at
the page:
http://www.meredithefken.com/html/read.html
The first change I would make would be to split the
content of the page into two pages. One page would be
about all Meredith's books (there will be more). The
other page would be reserved solely for the one book
SAHM I Am, and should have a filename like:
http://www.meredithefken.com/html/sahmiam.html It's
important to make each page on a website be about one
thing only.
The next optimization is very quick. At the top of the
browser, you'll see the title for the page: "For your
reading pleasure - Check out my books, read an
excerpt..."
That's not a bad title for a general page on all
Meredith's books, but if we want a page dedicated
solely to this one novel, then the new title should be
something like this: "SAHM I Am, a mom-lit novel by
Meredith Efken." That describes the page perfectly and
has the crucial keyword. Note that this title will be
the first thing shown by Google in its results page.
If you choose the "View Source" menu option on your
browser, you can see the actual HTML that underlies the
page. HTML can be very confusing, but for our purposes,
what we care about are the metatags, which are near the
top. On this particular page, there are two:
These define various aspects of the page, but they
don't include the metatags for the keywords and
description. This is easy to fix. There are two metatags
needed, and each has a different purpose.
First, Meredith should add a description metatag like
this:
The "content" part of this metatag will be displayed by
Google in the results for any search on "SAHM I Am".
Note that it's basically an ad to entice people to
click on it. The description metatag should be
alluring! And truthful. If the book wins an award, the
description should mention that. Tastefully.
Second, Meredith should add a keyword metatag like this:
The "content" part of this metatag will alert all
search engines that this page is EXTREMELY relevant to
any searches on the keyword phrase "SAHM I Am".
Meredith could dilute the value of this keyword by
adding a second one, such as "Stay At Home Moms". But
it would be better to add a new page to her site with
helpful tips for Stay At Home Moms, and optimize that
page for that keyword.
The rest of the optimization process should be clear.
Meredith should add some copy with a summary of what
the book's about. The header for this copy should
include the words "SAHM I Am". The copy should also
include these words.
The page has two important graphics on it, showing the
front and back covers. By viewing the source for the
page, you can easily find the alt-tags for these
images. The front cover image has the alt-tag: "SAHM I
Am". I would recommend changing this to "Front cover of
the novel SAHM I Am, by Meredith Efken". The back cover
image has the alt-tag: "Read the Back Cover!" I would
recommend changing this to "Read the back cover of the
novel SAHM I Am, by Meredith Efken!"
Once Meredith does these optimizations, she should let
Google and the other search engines know. That's easy
to do--just go to the search sites and find the page
where you can request that your site be indexed. Even
if you don't do this, the engines will find your page
eventually, but making a request to the engines will
make it happen sooner, rather than later.
If Meredith does all this, will it guarantee zillions
of hits? No, not by itself. There's another factor that
search engines use to determine which pages get ranked
the highest: How popular is the site that contains this
page?
Life really is unfair. Rich people get richer.
Beautiful people get beautiful spouses. Popular people
get more popular.
And popular pages on the web get more attention from
search engines than unpopular ones. Google's great
contribution to humanity was to figure out a way to
determine which pages are "most popular". The basic
idea is simple--a page is considered popular if lots of
other pages on the web link to it. There's some math
involved here to prevent cheating, and Google does that
math very well. So don't cheat. But do be wise.
In view of this, I recommended that Meredith add a
"Links" page to her site with links to her friends' web
pages (including mine, of course!) Then she can solicit
her friends to link back to her site. (In a tasteful
way. There are some perfectly tacky ways to solicit
links. You all know people who use these methods. You
have all been electronically groped by these people.
It's a little unpleasant.)
Getting links to a site takes time, so Meredith's site
won't instantly become a major web portal. But over a
few months, she should expect to see her search engine
ranking improve. One way to get more links effortlessly
is to add useful and valuable content to her site. Then
people will find her site and link to it without even
being asked. They'll beg for the right! If that content
is somehow related to the subject of her novels, all
the better, but it's not a requirement.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear. Improving your
search engine ranking takes time and effort. Don't try
to cheat. Don't be tacky. Treat the web and its
denizens the way you want to be treated.
We'll tune in again on Meredith's site next month to
see if things have improved for her on the search
engine front. If not, I guess she can demand her money
back from me. But, oh yeah, my advice was free. In the
grand American tradition, that means she can sue me.
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5) Writing a Novel In a Month
November is National Novel Writing Month! Are you one
of the thousands of writers who'll be writing a novel
this November? It's fun, and you'll have a lot of
company. Check out the web site:
http://www.nanowrimo.org
If you'll be doing the NaNoWriMo thing this year,
October is the month to get your novel planned, so
you'll be ready to slam out that deathless prose in
November. So start brainstorming now!
I discovered NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago, when I
suddenly started getting tons of hits on my web site in
late October and early November. I checked where all
those hits were coming from and discovered that quite a
few of the NaNoWriMo participants were big fans of my
Snowflake Method for Writing a Novel.
Of course (no surprise) some people prefer a different
method than mine to get their novel organized. Makes no
bones to me. I'm glad that I've been able to help some
people, and I'm grateful to the NaNoWriMo forums for
helping make my Snowflake page famous around the world.
It's that pesky Snowflake page that has driven this
very e-zine to its current level of popularity. Most of
you have been on this page, but just in case you
haven't, the link is:
http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/the_snowflake.html
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6) How Can I Help You?
I'm a selfish guy, no doubt about it. My oldest
daughter just started college, and she's working in the
cafeteria at minimum wage, which is not a great way to
keep the wolf from the door. So in sheer self-interest,
I asked her if she'd be interested in doing some
proof-reading or copy-editing work. I know plenty of
publishers who'd pay her more than minimum wage to do
that kind of thing. After all, she's an English Lit
major with an 800 on that pesky SAT in English. She's a
National Merit Scholar. She can do this with her eyes
closed.
My daughter is no dummy. She knows I'm not made of
money, so she said she'd love to try it. Besides,
proofreading novels has got to be more fun that
slinging hash. So she's really excited about the idea.
That got my neurons jiggling. It struck me that if
publishers are willing to pay her to do proofreading,
then maybe writers out there in cyberspace might be
willing to pay her too. Once I got thinking along those
lines, I realized that I know other folks with similar
skills. A whole lot. I know zillions of writers and
editors with a multitude of talents: proofreading,
copyediting, critiquing, literary analysis, mentoring,
ad nauseum.
Not only that, but I know lots of writers, published
and pre-published, who might need those skills applied
to their Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Genius.
So it occurred to me that I could hook up people who
need help with people who know how to help. I'm
exploring this idea right now. I'd love to be able to
help you in your writing. This e-zine is one way I can
do that. Another way is to help you find someone who
can give you a good mentoring or critique or edit or
proofread at a reasonable price.
Are you interested? If so, DON'T email me! I'm on
deadline right now, and I can't handle a deluge of
email. But you can indicate your interest
electronically, which will let me know what sort of
help you all would be interested in paying for. I've
set up a database to keep track of who's interested in
what. Just pop on over to my web site and fill out the
form.
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/html/mentoring.html
Don't worry, no sales-droid will call on you. If and
when I figure out what sort of services people are
interested in, and which of my friends can provide
those services, I'll send you a short email to let you
know, and that should be that.
If I do decide that this is a service I can help
provide, I'm going to rely on friends I know and trust
to do the actual work. I want to be able to vouch for
the quality of anyone who would be doing this sort of
work. (Plus I need to be able to punch them if they do
a bad job.) So please don't write me volunteering to
work for me, unless I already know you really well.
I've already talked to several qualified friends who
are interested in working on this project.
I have no idea where this idea is going to end up. It
may turn out that nobody needs this kind of work. Or it
may turn out that I can't find the right kind of
workers. Or the sky could fall and whack us all. Lots
of things could go wrong. If you fill out the form on
my web site, you're not committing to anything, and
neither am I. But wouldn't it be great if I could help
a bunch of you improve your writing, and get my
daughter gainfully employed at the same time? That, my
friends, is a win-win thing-a-ma-jig, not to mention a
GREAT step on my path to Total World Domination.
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7) What's New At AdvancedFictionWriting.com
As always, things have been busy here. I've been
teaching at what seems like a zillion writing
conferences this year. I'll be doing two more before
the New Year rolls around. I won't bore you with
details, because you are intelligent and diligent and
you therefore know where to look up my calendar if you
really care to come listen to me quack about writing:
http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/calendar.html
I'm currently on deadline for my next novel. The wheels
of publishing sometimes grind painfully slow, which
means that I STILL haven't signed the contract on this
book yet (although it finally came today by FedEx).
Alas, I don't feel comfortable giving details of deals
that don't have the ink dry on them yet. Suffice to say
that this book may well turn out to be my Big Break In
Publishing. Or my Big Splat in Publishing, if I really
screw up this opportunity. I'll be able to say more
next month, and I hope I can also tell you some details
on my Tiger Marketing plan for the book. Until then,
I'll be typing my little fingers to the bone.
See ya next month!
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8) Steal This E-zine!
This E-zine is free, and I personally guarantee it's
worth 104 times what you paid for it. I invite you
to "steal" it, but only if you do it nicely . . .
Distasteful legal babble: This E-zine is copyright
Randall Ingermanson, 2005. Gack, I hate this.
Extremely tasteful postscript: I encourage you to
email this E-zine to any writer friends of yours who
might benefit from it. I only ask that you email the
whole thing, not bits and pieces. That way, they'll
know where to go to get their own free subscription, if
they want one.
If you email it to them, remind them tactfully that
they should name YOU as the person who referred them,
if they sign up. People who name themselves as
referrers unfortunately don't get credit, so they might
as well be honest and admit it was you!
At the moment, there are two such places to subscribe:
My personal web site: http://www.RSIngermanson.com
My new web site: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com
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Randy Ingermanson
Publisher, Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine
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